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Girl’s Parents and Agency Face Charges in Starvation

PHILADELPHIA — A city agency that was faulted by a grand jury in connection with the death of a teenage girl in its care is working to repair systemic problems that have led to other fatalities, its new commissioner said Friday.

Nine people were charged on Thursday in connection with the girl’s death, including two social workers for the city agency, the Department of Human Services.

According to the grand jury report, the girl, Danieal Kelly, 14, starved in a dark room in a West Philadelphia apartment in August 2006. At the time, she weighed 42 pounds, about the weight of a normal 5-year-old, because her mother, Andrea Kelly, had stopped feeding her enough to live on.

Danieal, who had cerebral palsy, had lost almost all ability to talk or move, and was severely neglected by her mother, who had eight other children and was embarrassed to be seen in public with her disabled daughter, the report said.

Anne Marie Ambrose, commissioner of the Department of Human Services, said she could not explain why some of her 1,900 employees failed to save Danieal after receiving four complaints about her welfare. She could also not explain why that staff had allowed a private contractor working on the girl’s case to neglect her.

“I believe that a lot of the things issued in the report are accurate and true, but I’m using it as a platform to move forward and really change the system,” Ms. Ambrose said in an interview.

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Danieal Kelly, 14, weighed just 42 pounds when she died.Credit
Philadelphia District Attorney

She acknowledged that the agency shared responsibility for Danieal’s death. “There were many, many staff at D.H.S. who failed Danieal Kelly and her family,” said Ms. Ambrose, who took over as head of the agency on June 23.

In May 2007, a city panel set up to review the department’s child welfare operations in the wake of the Kelly case and 51 other deaths of children in the agency’s care over several years, urged changes that Ms. Ambrose said were being adopted.

Employees have been retrained with an increased emphasis on safety, and the agency has adopted a “huge focus” on accountability, Ms. Ambrose said.

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The agency is also reconsidering its reliance on outside social service agencies to manage individual cases, given the failure of the contractor in the Kelly case, which no longer works for the department, Ms. Ambrose said.

“We have great concerns about the monitoring of the private provider in this case,” she said.

The grand jury charged Andrea Kelly, 39, with murder and involuntary manslaughter. It charged Danieal’s father, Daniel Kelly, 37, who was separated from her mother, with endangering the welfare of a child.

Two social workers with the Department of Human Services were charged with felony counts of child endangerment. The report said they ignored concerns from friends and relatives that the girl was being neglected, and failed to ensure that MultiEthnic Behavioral Health, the private contractor assigned to the case, was doing its job.

The grand jury also charged two of the contractor’s employees with involuntary manslaughter and forgery. They were accused of falsifying documents after the girl’s death in an effort to show they had been working on the case.